The Corrupted Moral Logic of Modern War

Terrorists exploit children, then blame their enemies — and far too many people actually believe them.

Images are presented as proof of aggression rather than the outcome of a strategy that depends on precisely that reaction. (photo: Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Imagine two incidents involving children.

In the first, a man sets out to murder as many children as possible. He targets a school with more than a hundred inside. By sheer luck and effective security, the attack is foiled. No children die.

In the second, children are killed when a building is struck during a military conflict. That building sits inside a complex containing military infrastructure.

Both are horrifying. Both place children in danger. But they are not morally equivalent, nor would any court treat them as such.

In criminal justice, intent is central. It is the difference between attempted murder, murder, and manslaughter. The same principle applies at the highest levels of international law. Genocide, for example, is defined not simply by the number killed, but by the intent to destroy a group. Even science fiction understands this. In “Minority Report,” authorities arrest people based on intent alone.

A person who deliberately sets out to kill children commits one of the most serious crimes imaginable, even if the attempt fails. Tragic deaths that occur without that intent are judged differently.

Yet in modern conflicts, intent is routinely ignored or casually reassigned. Groups that openly target civilians and embed themselves among their own populations can appear morally superior, while militaries attempting — however imperfectly — to protect civilian life are judged almost entirely by the tragedies they fail to prevent.

Consider the attempted attack on a synagogue school in Michigan two weeks ago. Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, a 41-year-old Michigan man, intended to carry out a mass killing of preschoolers. The only reason those children are alive today is because security prevented him from reaching them. There is no ambiguity here. No one is debating his intent. It was the attempted mass murder of children.

And yet much of the coverage did not simply report what happened. It moved quickly to explain the attacker — his motives, his grievances, the conditions that might have produced him. Outlets such as the New York Times, CBS News, and ABC News emphasised that the suspect had family members killed in an Israeli airstrike, placing that detail directly in the headline.

In other words, the attempted murder of children was quickly reframed through the suffering of the man who intended to kill them.

Many of these reports also initially omitted an extraordinary detail: Members of his family were linked to Hezbollah. One relative had been involved in managing weapons operations and overseeing rocket fire against Israel, and was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon alongside his children.

Civilian deaths, especially those of children, are tragic. But notice how responsibility is assigned. The presence of children alongside a militant target is not treated as a failure of those responsible for their safety. Instead, blame is transferred entirely onto the force targeting that militant.

Even if Hezbollah militants were not involved, the logic would remain identical. We would never accept an attempted massacre of Muslim preschoolers being explained away on the grounds that the attacker had lost family members on October 7th. In truth, we would never tolerate this reasoning in any case where the victims were not Jews.

It would be recognised immediately for what it is: depraved lunacy, collective guilt, racialised vengeance, moral collapse. No political grievance, no military strike, and certainly no relatives killed abroad justify attempting to slaughter children in a house of worship.

Not long ago, this was not controversial. The fact that it apparently is tells you everything about the speed of our societal decay.

Now consider the school in Minab, southern Iran. On February 28th, the first day of the current Iran war, the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School was reportedly struck during a wave of military activity. Iranian state media immediately framed the incident as a deliberate attack on children. If that were U.S. policy, it would not be an isolated event. It would be unmistakable, especially for a military capable of striking targets with extraordinary precision. But even the most advanced militaries inevitably make mistakes, sometimes catastrophic ones, and when they do, accountability is essential.

Early casualty reports fluctuated wildly, from single digits to well over a hundred — a familiar pattern for anyone who remembers the initial claims following the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion in Gaza 10 days after October 7th.

There was, however, one crucial detail missing from the early coverage of the Iranian school incident: Satellite imagery shows the school located directly inside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound. The building itself had previously formed part of the base and remained surrounded by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities, including a naval clinic and other military infrastructure.

This was not a civilian school in the usual sense. It was a school embedded inside a military complex. Such arrangements are common in irregular warfare, though they remain difficult for Western audiences to grasp.

The death of any child in war is a grave tragedy. I am not going to repeat that every few paragraphs as a ritual disclaimer. But acknowledging that tragedy should not prevent us from asking an equally important question: Why were children inside a building located within an active military compound, and who was responsible for placing them there?

Now consider how differently these two cases are judged. In peacetime, a man attempts to massacre children and fails. The conversation shifts toward understanding him. In wartime, a strike hits a building located inside a military compound. The assumption becomes deliberate murder.

Militaries that attempt to minimise civilian casualties are judged almost entirely by the tragedies they fail to prevent and the errors they inevitably make. Every mistake becomes evidence of calculated cruelty.

Now consider the reality on the ground. The Islamic Republic fires missiles indiscriminately toward Israeli population centres. Its rhetoric is explicit: “Death to Israel.” Iranian leaders and the proxy militias they fund, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, have repeatedly declared their goal to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state — not to pressure it, not to reform it, to remove it entirely. These are not careless remarks. They are statements of policy.

Iran and its proxies have not succeeded because Israel invested heavily in protecting its own population. It built some of the most advanced defensive systems on earth: Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow missile defences, bomb shelters built into homes, and early warning systems that move civilians to safety within seconds.

Those defences have prevented what would otherwise have been catastrophic civilian death tolls. Without them, the losses would be enormous. Israel might well have ceased to exist long ago had its citizens not poured so much of their collective ingenuity into defence.

But that success has produced a perverse outcome. Instead of being admired as a model for protecting civilians, its success often renders the threat invisible. When rockets are intercepted mid-air, there are no collapsed buildings, no mass funerals, no images to circulate.

A country that protects its civilians can begin to look as though it is not under attack at all. It can lead “anti-Zionist” commentators in the diaspora, writing far from the sirens and shelters, to conclude that “Iran poses no significant threat to Israel.”

Israel’s enemies operate with near impunity, while Israelis themselves are expected to absorb missile fire, send their children to school, and carry on as normal, not as an emergency but as a condition of daily life. No other country is expected to live like this.

Israel conducts some of the most precise military operations in modern warfare, often targeting specific individuals or infrastructure within dense urban environments. Its forces have carried out strikes that neutralise a single target inside a building while leaving the surrounding structure largely intact, or eliminate an operative on a crowded street without harming nearby civilians. This is the kind of capability studied closely by military planners around the world.

Gaza, of course, looks very different because civilians are not shielded from conflict but deliberately exposed to it by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on a scale rarely seen in urban warfare. They are concentrated in densely populated areas where military infrastructure sits among homes, schools, and hospitals. Rockets are launched from civilian neighbourhoods. Command centres operate beneath them.

When civilians are inevitably caught in the crossfire of a battlefield deliberately woven into civilian life, the resulting images are presented as proof of Israeli aggression rather than the outcome of a strategy that depends on precisely that reaction.

This strategy has been openly articulated. Hamas leader Nizar Rayan, one of the architects of its human-shield doctrine, promoted embedding fighters and infrastructure among civilians, turning civilian presence into a strategic asset.

In 2008, Hamas official Fathi Hammad declared that Palestinians had created “a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen.” In 2023, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said, “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh likewise said that “the blood of the children, women, and elderly” was blood “we need” to “ignite within us the spirit of revolution.”

The logic is simple: Force your opponent to choose between self-defence and catastrophic optics, then weaponise the images for global outrage. Either outcome benefits Hamas by design.

In modern conflicts, visibility often matters more than intent. The side that produces the most compelling images of suffering shapes the moral narrative, regardless of how that suffering came about. Much of the international community fails to grasp this dynamic, or prefers not to. Instead, they double down with renewed calls for more aid and more support without confronting the underlying incentives.

Over the past two decades, Gaza has received extraordinary levels of international aid — billions of dollars, among the highest per capita in the world. Yet that investment has not produced a meaningful system of civilian bomb shelters or evacuation infrastructure. Instead, enormous resources were poured into tunnels, rockets, weapons depots, and command centres embedded beneath civilian neighbourhoods, infrastructure deliberately designed to exploit civilian suffering for strategic and political gain.

And it has worked. Images of civilian harm have generated enormous international sympathy, political pressure, and diplomatic leverage. The more effectively a group embeds itself among civilians, the greater the reward when they are harmed.

That reward is delivered by governments, media organisations, activists, and international institutions that amplify suffering without verifying facts and rush to judgment before evidence is established. In doing so, they send a clear message to terror groups everywhere: Place civilians in harm’s way, and the world will pressure your enemy on your behalf. Others are watching. They are learning what works.

Which brings us to a question that should trouble anyone who still recognises the moral and legal gravity of using human shields: How do you defeat an enemy that does not care about its own civilians and uses their suffering as its primary weapon? How do you prevail when so much of the Western world amplifies and rewards such strategy, calling it “humanitarian,” while signalling to militant and terrorist groups everywhere that using your own people as cannon fodder works?

This dynamic cannot be allowed to stand. Any serious moral framework, in war or in law, must return to first principles: Intent matters, responsibility matters, and those who deliberately endanger civilians must be held accountable for the consequences of their choices.

If this inversion becomes normal, the future will inherit the consequences.

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